Don’t Blow This, Baseball

Sportswriters have been penning baseball’s obituary for decades, claiming that America’s pastime is past its time. The game is too slow, too stodgy, too old, too boring, they said. The kids don’t care.

But baseball is not dying. It’s thriving.

A thrilling World Series, set to resume tonight with Game 6 in Toronto, will bring to a conclusion another blockbuster Major League Baseball season. The Blue Jays are one victory away from their first title in 32 years but must win against the game’s best team and best player. A couple weeks ago, the Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani a delivered arguably the single greatest individual performance in the 122 years of the World Series era by hitting three home runs and pitching six shutout innings. And then, 10 days later, he nearly outdid himself by reaching base nine times in one game.

The rule changes implemented three years ago have all worked—most notably the pitch clock, which has cut the average game length down from 3 hours and 10 minutes in 2021 to 2 hours and 38 minutes this past year. Fans have responded to the quicker pace of play; attendance has surged, growing for the third straight year to an all-time high of 71.4 million. TV ratings are up again (more than 32 million people globally watched Game 1 of the World Series). Record revenues are flowing into the coffers of Major League Baseball. And after years of worry about the game’s graying audience, the fan base is getting younger. Ohtani is the biggest star, but Aaron Judge, Mookie Betts, and Bryce Harper have all broken through. Juan Soto signed the biggest contract in American sports. And, hey, even my Red Sox finally made the playoffs again.

But there is danger on the horizon: Those who are in charge of the game could be on the verge of delivering it a blow from which it may not soon, if ever, fully recover. The league’s collective-bargaining agreement runs out after next season, and nearly everyone in or around the game is bracing for a work stoppage. At the current trajectory, most believe that there will be either a lockout or strike extending long enough to force the cancellation of games. And if much, or all, of the season is lost, then baseball runs the risk of squandering its new momentum. At a time of economic strain, it will ask its fans to pick sides in a battle pitting millionaires against billionaires. It could lose an audience that has never had more alternate options for its ever-shrinking attention span. The goodwill—and new fans—that baseball has so recently gained could be lost.

Don’t do this.

Baseball has been here before. A 1994 strike led to the cancellation of the last 50 games of the regular season and did what no world war had done: called off the World Series. Tony Gwynn was denied a shot at hitting .400; the Montreal Expos lost their best chance at a title and soon found themselves searching for a new home. Furious fans stayed away. It took years for the game to recover, helped along by a string of feel-good stories: Cal Ripken broke Lou Gehrig’s consecutive-games streak, the Yankees [sigh] got good again, and, most important, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa’s home-run chase captivated the nation. In the new century, two of baseball’s signature franchises—the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs—ended decades-long championship droughts. MLB prospered, even as it remained defined by local allegiances. (Unlike many NFL fans, who obsess about the entire league—in part thanks to the rise of fantasy football and gambling—a healthy percentage of baseball fans really follow only their own team closely.)

Now, not all the news was good: That 1998 home-run chase and the exploits of some of the game’s biggest stars—Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Alex Rodriguez—were reported to have been chemically aided. And though the game was still financially flush, concerns were growing. It was too slow; there wasn’t enough action. Too many strikeouts, not enough offense. The league was struggling to draw new fans. And perhaps most of all, the games were simply too long. The sport that prided itself on not having a clock suddenly needed one.

Those of you who love four- or five-hour games won’t find an ally here (and not just because I have to wake up early). Of course, I fondly remember the five-hour Games 4 and 5 of the 2004 ALCS. But that was in October against the Yankees; we don’t need marathons in May against the Orioles. A series of rule changes were implemented after the 2022 season—bases got bigger; bullpen usage was tightened; defensive shifts were eliminated—in order to promote more action and speed things up. Most important, a pitch clock was introduced. Traditionalists were horrified. They got over it quickly. The game exploded in popularity again. And, of course, it didn’t hurt that perhaps the greatest player to ever play the game was entering his prime.

It’d be silly to write about baseball in the year 2025 and not spend one more moment on Ohtani. Fans have run out of superlatives with which to describe his brilliance, how he gets us to expect the impossible, how he routinely makes us turn to one another slack-jawed while gasping, “Did you just see that?”

One of the persistent knocks against MLB was that it didn’t know how to create or market stars. After David Ortiz and Derek Jeter hung up their cleats, MLB didn’t have an obvious face of the league. Big names in other sports, such as the NBA’s Steph Curry and the NFL’s Patrick Mahomes, gobbled up the endorsements and starred in viral TV ads. Baseball was sluggish in embracing social media, and its dusty unwritten rules frowned on displays of exuberance and showmanship even as young sports fans across the country thrilled to swaggering touchdown dances and flashy three-pointers. Baseball’s consensus best player, Mike Trout, was quiet and unassuming, and seemed content to ply his craft in obscurity on sub-.500 teams in suburban Orange County, California. Ohtani, as hard it is to remember now, was there, too, playing the first six years of his career down the street from Disneyland while becoming the first credible two-way player since a guy named Babe Ruth. But once Ohtani moved up the I-5 to Dodger Stadium, he became the best baseball player in history and the game’s biggest star in decades.

But all that goodwill could vanish after next season. Negotiations over the current collective-bargaining agreement endangered the 2021 season until, with just weeks to go before Opening Day, the rank-and-file players overruled the MLB Players Association’s executive committee and accepted the league’s offer (the season started a little late, but no games were lost). The ink was still drying on that deal when both sides circled the 2026–27 offseason as the moment to fully wage war, particularly over one key issue: a salary cap.

A yawning chasm separates the payrolls of the league’s top-spending teams from those of its lowest. For example: The New York Mets’ payroll was $323 million this season while the Dodgers spent $321 million, and the Yankees, $293 million. On the other end of the spectrum stand the Miami Marlins at $67 million, the Sacramento (for now) Athletics at $73 million, and the Tampa Bay Rays at $79 million. The massive payroll disparity comes, in part, because MLB is the only major American professional-sports league without a salary cap. The players’ union has made it clear that they won’t accept that. (Harper yelled at MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred when he brought it up in a recent clubhouse visit.) They believe that a cap is just a way for rich owners to direct more of the $12 billion industry’s money away from players. Many players—and fans—point the finger squarely at the small-market owners who cry poverty and don’t spend, accusing them of caring more about franchise valuations than about keeping their stars and fielding a winner. Sell the team, they say, if you don’t want to do enough to compete.

The league, meanwhile, believes that the current system of luxury-tax penalties for big-spending teams isn’t enough and that a cap is necessary to level the playing field. It points to polling that says fans are on board and acknowledges that a salary floor would come along with it; in other words, if the Dodgers are forced to keep their spending below a certain threshold, then a team such as the Pittsburgh Pirates would be forced to spend at least a league-mandated minimum. It’s true that despite the monetary discrepancies, there is some parity: Baseball hasn’t had a repeat champion since 2000, and in the past 11 years, there have been 10 different title winners. But, the league argues, the last bottom-15 market team to win a World Series was the Kansas City Royals, in 2015, and year after year, it’s predominantly big-market teams that are playing at the end of October with a chance to win a title.

With both sides dug in, formal negotiations aren’t slated to begin until next spring. Most people around the game believe that, unless something changes, games will be lost in 2027—maybe half a season’s worth or more.

The kids care. Mine certainly do, anyway. My two sons (ages 14 and 10) play travel baseball and follow MLB religiously. They have their own fantasy teams. Our long car rides are spent discussing possible offseason trades. They talk trash with their friends. Their biggest wardrobe decision when getting dressed in the morning is choosing between Roman Anthony jerseys (including for school-picture day). They hate all things pinstriped (can’t imagine where they got that from).

Baseball is passed down within families. Your allegiance is in your bloodline. The love of the game was passed from my grandfather to my father to me and my brother, and now to my sons. Back in 2020, the sports leagues were debating how to restart during the deadliest year of the coronavirus pandemic. America was desperate for a distraction, some sort of sign that life could be normal again. The owners and players fought then, too, and baseball was the last major sport to figure out a way to come back. Had they failed, they would have rightly earned their fans’ fury. At the time, I remember agonizing over how I’d tell my young sons that their favorite sport wouldn’t be played.

My kids are older now. And they’ll play baseball in 2027 even if I have to tell them that major-league stadiums will stay dark. But I still dread it.

Don’t do it, baseball.